Claude Debussy Essay

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Introduction

Claude Debussy (1862-1918) was among the most influential composers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was a French composer who studied at the Paris Conservatory at the age of ten.

Debussy first heard Javanese Gamelan at the Paris World Exhibition in 1889; he then incorporated the elements of Gamelan into his own compositions to produce an entirely new sound.

Debussy was a 20th Century Impressionist composer. Changes towards classical tonality were tested in his time where by composers went against the traditional tonal system, tonal colour changed in ways no one thought it could. The whole tone scale derived from here.

Definition of whole-tone scale: a scalar arrangement of pitches, each separated …show more content…

He entered Paris Conservatory (school of fine arts) at the age of ten; whilst he was there his instructors recognized his talent but thought his sounds were odd. In 1880, Nadezhada von Meck (helped support Tchaikovsky) hired Debussy to teach her children the piano. He traveled with the family to Italy and Austria as well as spending two years at her estate in Russia. (Encyclopedia of World BIography, 2015)
Debussy believed that musicians should not be confined by theoretical rules, he believed in encouraging musicians to add their personal touch to suit their creations and compositions. He believed musicians should not stress chords to establish themes but to intertwine chords and patterns into one sound.
In Debussy’s own words: “I should like to see the creation – I, myself, shall achieve it- of a kind of music free from themes, motives, and formed on a single continuous theme, which nothing interrupts and which never returns upon itself. Then there will be a logical, compact, deductive development. There will not be, between two restatements of the same characteristic theme, a hasty and superfluous “filling in.” The development will no longer be that amplification of material, that professional rhetoric which is the badge of excellent training, but it will be given a more universal and essential psychic conception. (Hansen,

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